RISING STAR INCITES TV'S SEX REVOLUTION

Darren the Star Man lives up a Hollywood star hill, in a Hollywood star neighborhood, behind a Hollywood star gate.

A voice on the call box answers cheerfully and a buzzer buzzes. The gate swings open slowly. And you think: Darren Star, Hollywood boy wonder, is as rich as he wants to be and as gold as the Golden Globe he just won. And he still answers his own door.

You think he must be real people, even if the people in his shows are hardly real.

A long drive leads to a house that looks like a set on Melrose Place, one of the shows he created. Vaulted ceilings. White on white. White carpet. Crystal. A pink rubber duck.

Star (and that is his real name -- you would have to have a much bigger ego than even he has to make up a name like that and go to Hollywood) takes you to a room with a fine leather sofa. He's wearing a black T-shirt and bluejeans. Judy, his golden retriever, comes in for attention. Star throws a sock ball and begins talking about the sexual revolution on television, in which, shall we say, he played the role of pushing as far as it would go.

He began in 1991, at 28, with teen sex: Beverly Hills, 90210, the first show to really explore the fact that some high school kids did indeed have sex.

Two years later, it was lustful singles' sex among twentysomethings: Melrose Place, about sex when you think you're an adult but you're not quite. The pop phenomenon captured millions of fans with lurid over-the-top stories, all the while loosening prime-time morals.

Now it's thirtysomething sex: Sex and the City, the hit HBO series dubbed by some critics as "Dirty Something," teetering -- as if wearing high heels -- on classy soft porn. The show has served notice to the broadcast networks that they can't possibly keep up.

Its first year, 1998, the show was nominated for an Emmy. Last season, it won two Golden Globes, one for the show, one for actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Star, 38, creator and executive producer, pulls the show's award off a shelf. It's shiny and gold, so new it hasn't yet been engraved.

Star felt superstitious about writing an acceptance speech ahead of time. So he didn't.

"I don't know what is worse: to win and have to make a speech, or to not win," he says.

He thinks about it.

"It's better to win."

Of course.

Starting young

Star grew up in the Washington suburb of Potomac, Md., and went to the University of Southern California and UCLA. He graduated in 1983 and became a waiter.

At 24, he sold a screenplay called Doin' Time on Planet Earth. He made enough money to quit his day job and started selling one screenplay after another.

In 1991, Fox Television asked Star to write a show about high school in Beverly Hills. That's how 90210, and Star's sexual revolution on television, began. He based that show's spinoff, Melrose Place, partly on the courtyard apartment complex he lived in after college.

In 1996, he moved to New York to launch another lavish youth extravaganza, CBS's Central Park West. The move split up Star and his mentor-producer, Aaron Spelling. Some said Star couldn't make it without Spelling, particularly after Central Park West turned out to be a colossal bust.

Star believed that most television shows did sex wrong, didn't know how to enjoy it, how to relax with it. They approached sex like teenage boys, in euphemisms and awkward terms.

"Ninety percent of the comedies are about sex," he says, "but the jokes are about what you can't say. There was a gap between what people sitting in the room thought was funny and what was on television. TV has always been behind society."

While he was working on Central Park West, reporter Candace Bushnell interviewed him for Vogue. "I got to know her," he explains, "and she kind of like took me around New York and introduced me to the New York night life. And she was beginning to write the column called 'Sex and the City.' I was taken by her, a woman writing a column about her crazy experiences."

Star optioned the column.

What resulted was the HBO series, in which Star explores love and the challenges of being single, New York-style, with four lustful women -- Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis -- drinking Cosmopolitans and Scotch. One regular character is referred to as Mr. Big. The theme pops up a lot, as in this plotline from the second-season finale:

A woman in a red dress and sling-back heels meets a man on a street. She gives him her number. He calls. Soon they're in bed. He warns her he is, well, blessed. She says she's not worried. When she sees, she gulps and takes a hit of a joint. Then beckons.

Cosmic questions

"We are not purposely looking to be sensationalistic," Star says. "You could watch the Playboy Channel for that. Nobody is watching Sex and the City to see sex. They are watching because they like the characters. This show has adult content, but that doesn't put it in that other category."

Many ideas for Sex and the City come from real-life experiences of "friends of friends" of staff members: cheating and wondering when cheating really is cheating; watching helplessly as a friend steals an old boyfriend; big and small problems in bed; feelings of inadequacy (He wouldn't even sign the wedding congratulations card with me -- does this mean he really doesn't want to commit?).

The show throws around four-letter words with the class of a martini as it asks such cosmic questions as: "Are all men freaks?" "Is it better to fake it than to be alone?" "Can you change a man?"

Circles of women are loving it. Circles of all colors. But, as in his other shows, the main characters are white. You wonder how four women can move through New York and encounter so few people of color. So you ask Star.

He isn't defensive: "The show has an inclusive sensibility. It can be better represented."

He thinks he lives in a world where people are people and color shouldn't matter. Really, he says, these four women could be any color. "I don't know how to write a black person. Or to write an Asian person. For me, to achieve diversity is by not specifying: In this show, this character could be white, black, Asian, Latino."

Problem is, none of them is.

But he's written a segment for the third season, which launches tonight, that delves into interracial romance and political correctness.

Each show Star created was a reflection of who he was, a fictionalized, fantasized reflection. Yet there is so little of him in the shows, you can't see him. His life offscreen is no imitation of what he writes onscreen. People are not jumping into and out of his life or his bed. The relationship he's in has lasted three years and he is content.

Puttin' on the hits

Time for the office. He drives through Hollywood to the studio, the writers' building. Star squeezes his convertible into a tight spot, climbs three flights to his office. Flowers litter the place, congratulating him on the Golden Globe. A big leopard-skin velvet chair shaped like a woman's high-heel shoe is in the reception area, a gift from someone who wants the shoe's design to appear on the show.

His assistant asks, "Darren, did you send the script on Friday?"

"No," he answers. "I haven't even written it yet."

It's Monday. He isn't fazed.

The phone rings. It's an agent, of course, and you know the agent is asking about the script of a new pilot about Wall Street that was supposed to be sent Friday.

"You'll get it," Star is saying nicely.

What you can't hear is the obvious word -- When?

"You'll get it when it's good."

He says that line without attitude but with the finality of truth, with no fear of repercussion. No snippy, uppity, snotty television-writer tone. But as a matter of fact.

What Star's television sexual revolution has come to is this:

After a highly successful 10-year run, 90210 bowed out last month amid eulogies and farewell serenades. Melrose Place lasted more than seven years. Sex and the City is on the rise. The $treet, his new drama about financial wheeler-dealers, will premiere on Fox this fall, and the WB has picked up his comedy Grosse Point, a satire set behind the cameras of a prime-time teen soap.

"From the moment Darren met at my house," his former mentor, Spelling, said recently, "I knew I wanted to work with him. He deserves huge credit for creating and making Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place the hits that they are.

"Would I like to work with him again? Just ask Darren when I can send him an airline ticket."

For now, it looks like Star is doing well all by himself, flying out there alone.